Crossbar challenge or fans squaring up on the pitch?

Should the crossbar challenge be suspended for Friday’s game against QPR so that Hoops top fan Lord Toby Young of Acton and VOTV fanzine editor Rick Everitt can square up on the pitch?   Young challenged Everitt to a confrontation on Margate beach earlier in the season.

Toby Young is a genuine QPR fan.  He lives in West London and goes to away matches in places like Hull accompanied by his 17-year old son who has to write up their adventures in a blog.   The travails of QPR are a regular theme of his column in the Spectator.   If the Super Hoops do win, the noble lord opens a £80 bottle of wine: no cheap plonk for him.  Fortunately for his budget, they don’t win too often.

To give some context, those of you have been watching the banking bonkathon Industry will recall that a recent episode involved a team of financial services predators heading off from Canary Wharf to persuade an Austrian aristo to surrender control of his private bank.  He lived in a weird castle with paintings by A Hitler on the walls.

The verdict was that if some of his neo Nazi views could be given a platform in Britain he might look more favourably on the takeover.   Someone mentioned the Spectator, but the quick response was that a magazine that carried articles on ‘Why I love the Wehrmacht’ would not fit the bill.  (Eventually, he got published in a Daily Mail/Telegraph type newspaper).

The Speccie certainly has some eccentric writers, particularly favouring Catholic reactionaries who want to question whether the Pope is a Catholic.  No articles have yet appeared on the toilet habits of bears who live in the woods.

Young is the head of the Free Speech Union which many believe exists primarily to give him a platform.   (His father, Lord Young of Dartington, was a really smart guy).

Anyway, Young decided to attack Everitt in his column as a ‘town hall tyrant’.   I’m not sure that being leader of a district council gives you that much power and while even some Addicks dislike the Rickster, he is hardly a threat to western civilisation as we know it.

Young challenged Everitt to meet him on Margate beach at 10.30 on a Tuesday morning.   The idea of two men in their early 60s having handbags at six paces on a windswept beach seems a little ludicrous to me.   Everitt sensibly refused to have anything to do with this bizarre publicity stunt and Young returned to London fulminating about a wasted day.

The really odd thing about all this is that I don’t think Young has realised that his adversary is an Addick.   Friday would give him a chance to put that right.   The winner could receive a bottle of Chateau Charlton Athletic.